Electric power is generally transmitted from generation plants to end users (industries, corporations, homeowners, etc.) via a transmission and distribution grid consisting of a network of power stations, transmission circuits, and substations interconnected by power-lines. Once at the end users, electricity can be used to power any number of devices.
Power outage management is one of the important features utilities look for when deploying AMI (advanced metering infrastructure) solutions. Some of the key goals of outage management are: reduction in the time it takes to identify a power outage, reduction of the time it takes to bring power up after an outage, reduction of truck rolls to fix a cascading outage, and fixing an outage before customers notice and call the utility. To this end, AMI vendor contracts often explicitly specify the time and reliability expected of “last gasp” messages from meters which lose power, such that the power outage may be effectively reported by meters noticing the loss of power. In current power outage management designs, however, such last gasp messages frequently go largely unheard.